StarStuff photo of the week This detailed close up of Jupiter's ice moon Europa shows its frozen water surface stained red in bands and ridges by water ice mixed with hydrated salts, possibly magnesium sulfate or sulfuric acid.

Europa has a global ocean layer beneath its icy surface and the patterns in this image may have formed when water in this ocean welled up through cracks in the ice. The area shown is around 163 kilometres by 167 kilometres.

The image, released by NASA this week, was created by combining two sets of data taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft.

The first set were greyscale images obtained on 6 November, 1997 during the spacecraft's 11th orbit of Jupiter, when it was approximately 21,700 kilometres from Europa. These images were combined with lower-resolution colour data obtained in 1998, during the spacecraft's 14th orbit of Jupiter when it was 143,000 kilometres from Europa.

Europa is one of Jupiter's four Galilean moons — these moons are named after their discoverer Galileo Galilei, and are visible from Earth. They also include the volcanic moon Io, the solar system's largest moon Ganymede, and Callisto the most distant of the four.

NASA's Galileo spacecraft spent eight years studying Jupiter and its moons. It was launched in 1989, arrived at Jupiter in 1995 and was terminated in 2003 when it was deliberately crashed into Jupiter.

Hosted by Stuart Gary, StarStuff takes us on a weekly journey across the universe. StarStuff reports on the latest news and discoveries in science, with a special focus on astronomy, space sciences and cosmology.

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